A Bright House

Jenny moved carefully, deliberately, through the toweling off and rinsing of the tub.

The experience of dislocation or perhaps even relocation had unsettled her but not to the degree that could be expected. Her self protective cloak of removal was of a fabric impervious to depths of shock. Loss wove a cape of disappointment, stitched it with broken heart thread, applied a tear duct dye. She made her way from the bathroom to the kitchen, wrapped in her oldest cotton robe, each step on the crooked staircase making its unique voice known. At the last step, Jenny held onto the top of the newel post for moments of all encompassing weariness. The oak was smooth and worn beneath slender fingers, reassuring somehow.

Real in ways that she wasn’t. She lifted her gaze to the cracked plaster of the hallway ceiling, the cornice badly in need of repair, and felt within the all too familiar welling up of abject hopelessness.

The kitchen at the back of the main floor had been updated in the late 80s, boasting the high gloss finish on out of fashion cabinets, a double wide sliding door that was top to bottom glass pane, and old appliances that functioned perfectly but had the patina of user fatigue about them. Jenny kept her house tidy. It was easy to do without a family or pets. A small yard adjacent to a busy lane was choked with overgrowth and shaded by a massive silver maple. She liked it that way. The old wooden shed had once been roomy enough for one car, but Jenny had used it to store Scott’s belongings after selling her beater of a Honda. From within the shed, she wrapped thick chains around the two metal latch arms that once held a chunk of two by four as a security measure against the thieves who prowled Toronto’s many residential alleys. The small wooden door that opened into the yard was also overkill locked, with a massive hasp and over the top forged steel and brass Olympus. Jenny poured a tall glass of apple juice, her thoughts drifting to the interior of the shed. How many years since she had opened it up?

Opened the wounds? Three Christmases ago? Enforced numbness, her survival reflex (but survival to what end?) had dictated that she not have her love’s face available to injure her as she moved about her house. The indelible psychic imprint of him proved more than enough. The endless reminder of what could have been, with each couple passing on sidewalks, pushing strollers, holding hands... the moving of his every belonging into storage in musky darkness had been the only solution.

As Jenny made her way outside to sit at a small round table next to the trunk of the maple tree, out of sight from neighboring eyes when the leaves were fully grown, the man who had eaten at the Logan Street Grill found himself feeling suddenly quite ill. Prone on his back in a hotel room a couple of miles to the east of Bright street, Ray Townes fought to control a sickening rise of emotion in his stomach and chest. The curse and gift of his clairvoyance had come bearing an unusually developed facility for picking up vibrations held within objects; psychometry.

Emotionally raw and feeling very much the prairie boy in a strange ugly world, he had met with the woman who had become his father’s second bride earlier that afternoon. She was never in his heart, had not known his acceptance even as he strove for it. This was the woman who had taken his father away to live in distant Ontario. The already tense relationship between father and son had been sanded to the bone by her sudden arrival in their lives. Her dominating persona. The controlling manipulative methods by which she doled out approval and cold reproach... Ray’s spiritual ingredients taught him one way, yet his visceral reactions were at odds. Doing the right thing before Sunday’s funeral service, held in a land not of his father’s choice or heart song, meant visiting the grieving widow to offer compassionate support.

Ray placed his thoughts into the spaces that allowed for this compassion. She had found Ray senior sitting in his favorite armchair. Rising from bed to use the washroom, he had told her, but when the minutes stretched into an hour... and it was so typical of his dad to not want to inconvenience anyone.

To slip through the veil quietly in his favorite chair, rather than plead and cling to life with a clutching hand toward his second life partner. The visit had been polite and very strained below the surface. Both he and Margret passed the half hour in willful ignoring of their respective lie detectors. She was alone and the pain was genuine. That much made the gesture worth his discomfort. What was her decade compared to his mother’s several? What was her pain, next to the pain of a father’s son?

Ray’s decision to eat at Jenny’s place of employment had been as sudden as the arrival of his hunger that morning. His flight had touched down early. The taxi into downtown met with surprisingly smooth traffic flow as the commuters flocked in on Lakeshore boulevard and the Gardiner Expressway. Taking the subway north from Union Station, transferring to trolley car at Queen street for a lengthy ride to the hotel in Toronto’s eastern Beaches neighborhood, he’d felt that instant hunger and began to scan the passing storefronts for a place to eat. Much, if not most, of Ray’s life had in its core a feeling of being guided, externally so. The horrible pain of losing his mother to suicide had marked his formative years with a fire so frightening, a cutting loose of ties so complete when his father equally unraveled into silence and stoic agony, that Ray had thrown himself to the winds of unfettered intuition. The inward mutation had been with him since childhood’s earliest recall,and he’d known even then to keep much of what he perceived to himself. He didn’t see others like him. Not in middle of horizon farmer town nowhere. Losing his beloved mother that way, with her hiding the signs of desperation as it built, not leaving explanation of any kind, leaving two who loved her to a haunted speculative nothingness... that had been Ray’s breaking point of no return.

The ability to see between. His visions controlled him in ways that were both terrifying, limiting, and exhilarating. At twenty years his ancient feeling soul became untethered. He went deep into his guiding forces. They took him from the wheat and sky vistas of home to the Rocky mountains, down to northern California where he met others somewhat of his kind and learned that he could not find community within their numbers. He worked and lived nomadically, growing ever distant from his father back home, who still toiled on the small farm and for a number of years wanted no other love to enter and injure his life. Ray sent postcards from Switzerland, France, Italy, Norway. He shaped himself through the very willingness to be an open vessel to teachings vast and varied and so far beyond his grasp as to be his one proof of God. Returning home each year for Christmas, staying into the new days of January, he loved his father and felt the love returned but in ways not spoken or outwardly expressed. Always, the duality of that which bound father and son; the exquisite agony of emptiness in the house and its surrounding acres. One year had begun the escalating tension between them, when Ray professed a new-found relief that the woman they loved had chosen to opt out the way she did. Rather than stay in a lie of hidden unhappiness, she had followed the very guidance that laid the pathways of her son’s own choices.

At the old dinner table in the large dining room with its double hung heritage windows looking out into vast flat sameness of a winter’s white blanket, Ray junior’s words hung in the air for a moment and then seemed to fire themselves into his father’s chest, like bullets. To his grave, to his meeting of the maker, Ray Townes would regret uttering those careless thoughts to a man whose bereavement had only grown in scope and power. Then, however, still young and brash enough to know a little of everything, the world traveler more alive in freedom than his incarcerated soul of a father, he had not felt the regret of that moment. It took years to get there.

How these Rays had come from the same seed and been born so utterly different; this weighed heavily on the younger Ray. It was in the cruel beauty of hindsight’s trickery and revelation that Ray came to know about his mother. She had been like her boy. Creeping memories of her reverie through the kitchen windows, distant eyes in summer wheat waving and wind rippled, came haunting.

He had recollections of being very young, just in school, and some of the things she would say on their wide front porch. His beautiful mother had been born out of place. Out of sync. To be aware of such a thing during a lifetime, and to be helplessly bound by duty and circumstance against all wishes to change the details; it was a process of growing realization that eventually liberated Ray from his aching loss and the deeply embedded anger that came with it. His decade between twenty and thirty years became marked by the bittersweet forgiveness that he lived and breathed. He extended it to his father, accepted that they silently loved each other, and moved into his own freedom, wholly so. It occurred to him then, as now, that the more it seemed to matter, the less it all meant. This way of seeking meaning within the confined perceptions of human mortality was the entirety of the why in all of it. Accepting a lack of answers while embracing, cherishing, the seeking... this was where Ray devoted his energies.

And so it was that Ray saw the 1940s exterior of the Logan Street Grill and left the trolley car at the next available stop. Walking the one block west, eyes fixed on the wrap-around front windows, he’d had the ever familiar blood hunch. It didn’t come with visuals this time, but was keener and more puzzling for all of its intense urgency. He reached for the old metal handle on the front door, bemused and inwardly taking note of the swirling emotions, and when pulling the door knew a replayed loop of such potency as to almost stop him right there. It had buckled him in the knees. Released a billion bubbles behind his eyes that dispersed in a vertigo flight. Only moments later did it hit home. His first glance at the woman at the distant end of the room, pouring coffee. Her aura, her essence, the cascade of opaque slides of clairvoyant messaging... everything he could do to haul it back in and regain some semblance of composure. Her ... no, IT... it held a peculiar familiarity echo across years lived and yet to live. Once again, as so many times before, Ray’s guided life showed itself to him for the truth of its unknowable foundation.

So it was that evening that Ray found himself emotionally and physically drained. He showered and dressed, thinking to walk the neighborhood, maybe to have a light patio meal and a cold beer or two, and decided to give way to thoughts about Jenny. They hadn’t ceased since his departure from the diner, but had been muted. The escalation of their attention want came during the shower, as he experienced a brief flash of her soaking in a tub. Such a bottomless sadness in his impression of her.

More so that evening than at the diner, where she was exerting control over herself. Being empathic in the extreme, Ray directly felt her emotions during that flash. It made him dizzy. He finished his shower, dressed, and went to the bed after closing the vertical blinds. Into one of the luminescent panels of her face, her slightly down-turned mouth and tear rimmed eyes, he allowed the falling to happen. It was a push forward, his consent to it, and then the sensation of gravity leaving, the room dissolving, the world no longer defined or limited. Within his eyelids, the black and red phosphene ballet, he reached... he reached for her. Without images that revealed Jenny’s reasons for passing time in a constructed void, Ray had an answer forming. It came attached to the same intuitive accuracy that had marked him from childhood. With the story yet to be fully known,he felt violently affected and nauseous. It was going to be more than a visit to a departed father’s funeral service. It was becoming an entirely other reason for unfolding as it was. Tasting it almost, in the spiral of the room that barely held him there, Ray reached with his right hand for the night table.

There, then, as Jenny sat alone in her small back yard beneath the tall maple, a glass of apple juice ignored and warming as she stared at the old shed and disappeared, the man who was about to change her life covered his eyes with a left palm that became wet with tears. The other hand, the one born of sight unexplainable, gently held the teaspoon that he had taken from the diner after Jenny refilled his coffee for the final time.

What is an upside down vehicle in a barren stretch of November deadened field, beside a two-lane highway in a sparsely populated county?

What is this crumpled wreck when examined and found to be empty save for dozens of large bloodied feathers?

What further mystery greets the investigating eye when a single trail of blood droplets can be seen leading deeper into the expanse of field, only to cease after three hundred yards? Where is the body? What does a small town police chief make of such a thing? After several days of searching the rugged woods and knocking on the doors of assorted farm houses, what words will be appropriate to deliver comfort where none is possible to the family members suddenly shattered? How far will investigating authorities pursue a truth for closure? Do they dust the Buick’s interior and puzzle over the only prints belonging to the registered vehicle owner? Yes...

Do they have the many large feathers forensically examined? Yes... results are “inconclusive”.

Something akin to the rare Saker falcon, but a different DNA profile.

A good Samaritan, doing the good and proper thing, has met with an unknown fate distinctly less than good.

Of those who feel something keenly in the aftermath of the strange car accident, one constable who is the lone arm of the law in the tiny hamlet of Allenford which is the nearest community to the crash site, feels a deep sense of frustration. Will Pritchard is near retirement age. He knows the lay of the land, can accurately forecast a week’s worth of weather from one sunset, and was a good friend to the deceased. Pritchard is the last man in the field, then walking into the thick bush, reading the ground as you might read a chapter. He is out there each afternoon, long after the investigation grows cold and the ache of loss has somewhat dulled into permanent numbness for the surviving family and closest friends.

Will parks his patrol car just behind the slewing rubber marks that autograph the road for a hundred and twenty feet before veering to the right. There are no guardrails here, this being a rather poor county without the tourism allure of neighboring ones. Pritchard will park, walk the roadside gravel, studying the skid. There are still tiny cubes of shattered windshield glass in the field. The blood type that comprised the wandering trail of spatter was a match to the deceased, who by every indication was gravely wounded and badly staggering. Where the spatter came to an abrupt stop, where blood should have pooled or spilled in a higher density, there was nothing to indicate a logical answer to the mystery. Did the severely injured driver somehow stem the flow, perhaps with an article of clothing? It had been a geyser trail from vehicle to vanish, and so this didn’t hold water for Pritchard. Could he seriously entertain the outlandish idea that the feathers belonged to something that carried away the deceased?

Here, weeks after the file has grown cold, the breadcrumbs stale, constable Will Pritchard stands knee high in brown December grasses. A hard blanket of icy snow coats the earth from which the sleeping vegetation sprouts. He lights a cigar and looks back at the patrol car. Waves to a passing truck driven by a familiar local face, then stares up into an uncaring sky that will always keep its secrets.